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Case in Point

Client Company Info

Venture Richmond engages business and community leaders in partnering with the city of Richmond, Virginia, to enhance the community’s vitality through economic development, marketing, promotion, advocacy and events. Its areas of focus include supporting Richmond’s strategic direction and efforts to enhance its business climate, providing enhanced services downtown and ensuring diverse representation. In addition to a Board of Directors, the organization is divided into eight committees, including Executive, Finance, Marketing/Advocacy, Events, Committee, Service District, Education and Minority Economic Participation.

Challenge

Venture Richmond, in collaboration with the City of Richmond, sought to develop a new brand identity for Virginia’s capital. This RVA/Venture Richmond initiative was powered by a cross-functional/cross-company team that combined the unique talents of Richmond’s best and brightest in advertising, marketing, media and business.

The team, comprised of the VCU Brandcenter, The Martin Agency, The Hodges Partnership, Elevation, J H I and WCG, focused on creating a new-world, open-source campaign to produce a cultural region-wide groundswell that would capture the imagination of the city and spread virally. Collectively, it was decided to promote Richmond as the Capital of Creativity. Then came the real work: devising a campaign strategy to make that happen.

Solution

WCG’s fundamental belief is that diversity of thought is our most powerful asset, so we were excited to be afforded a voice in such a pivotal dialogue for Richmond and to bounce ideas off of some of the best minds in the city. From our experience, it is through the merger of diverse experiences, skill sets, backgrounds and perspectives that revolutionary concepts are formed and progressive ideas generated.

For weeks, the groups collaborated, while WCG contributed its unique voice to the conversation. After thoughtful and challenging discussions, the team landed on an idea to kick-start the campaign—the RVA Creates website. The site’s purpose would be to fundamentally showcase what makes Richmond special and unique by providing an engaging format for participants. To that end, RVA Twitter, Facebook and blog feeds would be included on the home page.

WCG created the wireframes, navigation and architecture for the site. In addition to integrating these popular communications channels into an intuitive layout, the site also included an engaging attribute called The RVA Generator, which WCG assumed the task of designing.

Using the Adobe Flex framework, WCG custom-built The RVA Generator, a web capability that allows users to upload their own photos into the RVA stencil, or brand. In so doing, they can illustrate personal situations that are both uniquely Richmond or uniquely creative. The idea was to enable users to be as imaginative as possible and spur the creativity the RVA Creates campaign set out to spark.

Outcome

Though this was a challenging assignment, as an agency rich in diversity, WCG is accustomed to using collaborative environments to drive progressive thinking. Our talented graphic designers aggregated the team input into digestible, easy-to-understand, intuitive visual layouts. With dedicated staff support and strict attention to detail, we worked within tight deadlines to ensure the site was live to coincide with a public address by Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones without compromising the group’s artistic vision.

The RVA Creates site and the RVA Generator proved overwhelmingly successful, generating 10,000 unique views in just two months. But greater than that, WCG united with other great marketing thinkers to lay the groundwork for a new era for Richmond. We look forward to the site continuing to be a haven for sharing more stories of creativity within the Richmond community.

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